26 May 2017

Here's what Nature thinks of your puny roads

Highway 1 meanders more than 650 miles along California’s rugged coastline. The views from this ribbon of asphalt are so spectacular, and the terrain so gorgeous, that the feds declared it an “All-American Road” in 2002. People come from far and wide just to marvel at it. But much of the road was built on fragile ground in one of the most seismically tumultuous places in the world. Last weekend, the Earth reclaimed a sizable chunk of the highway.
More than 1 million tons of rock, dirt, and debris tumbled onto the highway on Saturday, burying one-third of a mile of road just south of Big Sur...

Caltrans, the state agency charged with building and maintaining roads,
has no idea when the road might open but said it will take months.

This is a spot where there are frequent small slides. I've lived in, and driven between, SF and LA for the last decade. Portions of the highway are closed almost every year to manage slides of all sizes.

How in heck would one even fix this? There's nothing stable on which to build a road, and it looks like further slides are imminent. (I suppose you could dynamite the mountainside into less-than-critical-angle slopes.)

In some places along the highway where slides are a perpetual issue, a barrier wall is dug in on the east side of the road to catch and divert future slides, and the western wall is shored up and capped with concrete or wire mesh. Repairs like that aren't built to be permanent, but sufficient to allow traffic to pass.

This comes on the heels of a Highway One bridge giving away several months ago, effectively cutting off Big Sur, its residences, campgrounds, inns, and livelihood. And now this.

California taxes anything it can lay it's greedy hands on. And the Sacramento liberals spend the $$ on social services to the illegals, a boondoggle of a high-speed rail line down the Central Valley, outrageous retirement demands by the labor unions, all the while ignoring the infrastructure. Such as the Oroville Dam, deteriorating roads and bridges, and....well you name it.

Caltrans pays for highway maintenance through fuel taxes (it's right there in the state budget, every year), and those funds don't go to social services. They go to road maintenance, rehab, and expansion (the constant repairs to PCH fall under the rehab allotment).

We went to Limekiln SP over the weekend--a place that's smack dab in the middle of the still-open section of PCH between the two closures. It takes a lot longer to get there via Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, but we weren't the only ones there (and I suspect that people who love PCH are also getting to love N-F Rd., too, since it's a gorgeous drive itself).

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